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Have you been feeling a little smug lately because you were th first person in your crowd to wear platform shoes and understand that "Acid House' is not a drug rehabilitation clinic but a style of dance music brought over from London? Do you think you're up tp speed on the New York dance weekend scene just because you know that Payday, Milky Way and $100,000 Bar are more than candy bars - they're movable nightspots that wouldn't be caught dead north of 14th Street?
Well, the one thing you can say about Downtown Manhattan nightlife is that the more things change, the more they change. Today keeping up with what's au courant on the dance scene has developed into a downtown art form.
Two years ago Downtown entered its intimate phase with clubs like Nell's and M. K. providing living room-like environments that served up dinner as the main course and dancing as dessert. A few months ago big clubs and Acid House reigned, but then Bloomingdale's and Macy's started selling Acid House paraphernalia, and the trend-setters backed off.
Now, danceaholics are having their heyday because of the emergence of new styles of club or "house" music. Most of the serious dancing begins after midnight and goes until 4 a.m.
Here's a beginner's guide to mastering the Downtown dance scene.
If you're hoping to raise your Hip Quotient this weekend, the two most important words in your vocabulary should be "house" and "voguing."
"House" is a basic club term with two distinct meanings. It can refer to a style of club music that has an incessant beat and mixes dance rhythms from the '60s, '70s and '80s. Many clubs have purchased haze-makers that produce a scary salmon-colored smoke that envelopes dancers while they're on the floor. Followers of house music say it's one-beyond the more simplistic disco tunes of the '70s .
Some of the best places to get your earful of house music are the World, Mars, The Tunnel, Tracks and the soon-to-be-reopened Sound Factory.
The second way trendies use "house" is when referring to a new group of dance gangs that could be Soul Train's...